eatingrich

Hey, I posted a thread in the hardware section about looking for a decent sound card under £20, but I'd stretch to £30 if it bought me a significantly better card.

However when looking around for sound cards I seem to find either generic cards for less than a tenner, or a sudden shoot up to expensive cards. There's also the option of buying an older card but then you risk getting one thats a bit obselete for modern gaming etc.

So - A user generously offered to sell me his Audigy 2 ZS, which looks like a good card and the impression I've gotten is that the Audigy series is probably the best <£30 card series you can go for.

However I've also seen on ebay stuff like Sound Blaster Live cards for less than a tenner.

What do you think is best, seeing as you lot are more audiophile than me?

Now obviously it depends on other things, such as speakers etc, and the issue is that I'm not an intense audiophile myself.

I'll use it mainly for: Games, listening to music (casually), but the girlfriend will also use it for Cubase and Sibelius (though not professionally). Similarly I plan to get a microphone at some point and do some casual, amateur recording.

The main issues that I'm aware of are things like making sure the card doesn't add anything to the load on the CPU, thus slowing down games etc.

I find the whole thing a minefield to be honest, so any help would be greatly received! Thanks!

__________________
Intel P4 3ghz CPU - 8kb primary cache - 512kb secondary cache

Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P4S800 REV 1.xx
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: Revision 1009 06/08/2004
1.75GB RAM - PC3200 DDR
76GB HDD - IBM-DTLA-307075
80GB HDD - Maxtor 6Y080L0 - Slave Drive (both NTFS)
NVIDIA 7300GT 256MB AGP 8x Graphics Card
Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card

dj_stick

ive owned a Live 5.1 (SB0600), an Audigy ES (SB0160) and an Audigy 2 ZS (SB0350).

each time there was a small step-up in audio quality, not much, but noticeable

you mention you don't want any CPU overhead for games? using a hardware accelerated card like a soundblaster will actually take some of the load off the cpu - not much by today's standards, but a little

as for using a microphone, i definately recommened getting an external preamp/mixer, as the build in mic preamp is designed for headset electret condensers, and is quite noisy

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eatingrich

Cheers for the reply,

I'm presuming all the cards you mentioned are hardware accelerated?

__________________
Intel P4 3ghz CPU - 8kb primary cache - 512kb secondary cache

Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P4S800 REV 1.xx
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: Revision 1009 06/08/2004
1.75GB RAM - PC3200 DDR
76GB HDD - IBM-DTLA-307075
80GB HDD - Maxtor 6Y080L0 - Slave Drive (both NTFS)
NVIDIA 7300GT 256MB AGP 8x Graphics Card
Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card

Robert McClelland

Audigy cards are better u get better mod support Vaule sucks and live also.

__________________
"XTREME AUDIO IS CRAP!" "There no support for it. It's crapist card on face of the earth it should be throw into the sun"

dj_stick

audigy value, audigy se, audigy ls and live! 24 bit ARE not hardware accelerated - most others are

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eatingrich

I presume Audigy 2 is hardware based?

__________________
Intel P4 3ghz CPU - 8kb primary cache - 512kb secondary cache

Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P4S800 REV 1.xx
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: Revision 1009 06/08/2004
1.75GB RAM - PC3200 DDR
76GB HDD - IBM-DTLA-307075
80GB HDD - Maxtor 6Y080L0 - Slave Drive (both NTFS)
NVIDIA 7300GT 256MB AGP 8x Graphics Card
Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card

zhengxiuwen

I'm a Chinese man,and I want to ask a question.Live 5.1 (SB0600), and Audigy (SB0090),which is better?Another question is who can use kx ?

eatingrich

I'm guessing an Audigy is a step up from a LIVE.

See DJ Stick's post further up.

__________________
Intel P4 3ghz CPU - 8kb primary cache - 512kb secondary cache

Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P4S800 REV 1.xx
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: Revision 1009 06/08/2004
1.75GB RAM - PC3200 DDR
76GB HDD - IBM-DTLA-307075
80GB HDD - Maxtor 6Y080L0 - Slave Drive (both NTFS)
NVIDIA 7300GT 256MB AGP 8x Graphics Card
Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card

dj_stick

both the SB0060 Live! and SB0090 Audigy cards are fully kX compatible - the Audigy will, however, have more DSP resources for more dsp plugins

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zhengxiuwen

Thank you.And I glad to talk with you.Do you known ,I'm living in Xi'an ,shannxi.